Just another Geocaching blog

The Geocaching Association of Safety (G.A.S.) has announced that they intend to file a petition with Groundspeak following an horrendous geocaching hand-glider crash. The petition, if successful, will require all geocache owners with caches neighbouring the sky to place warnings regarding the suitability of hand-gliding to the cache.

“Obviously we are concerned about the serious risk of geocachers being injured, or worse, due to geocaching hand-gliding accidents and we want to prevent that from happening” said G.A.S. spokesman Simon Fuller.

Mr Fuller, G.A.S. president since 2002, stressed that the situation was more dire than the media had presented. “We are concerned at the potential harm that could befall thousands of geocachers if cache owners do not take responsibility for highlighting serious hand-gliding issues with their caches” he said.

He highlighted a number of issues that the cache owner in the recent hand-gliding crash had failed to highlight, which included a lack of links to weather forecast information and learn to fly schools. “Another serious oversight by the CO was the failure to highlight the danger of sand in the area” he said. “In this recent crash the sand played a major role in the destruction of the hand-glider and the geocacher involved was extremely lucky he was not injured by the sand.”

The association had considered petitioning local authorities to place warning signs regarding the dangers of sand at every sandy location, but had decided that their focus should be on geocaching.

“We’re not here to spoil people’s fun, or stop people from hand-gliding to geocaches, however we strongly recommend against it. We simply want to ensure that every cache owner has seriously considered the issues involved in hand-gliding to their geocache and highlighted those issues in their cache listing.”

Mr Fuller stressed that every cache owner need look no further than the video of the recent geocaching hand-glider crash for evidence of why these changes were needed.

I’m confused. If a hang-glider has the equipment shouldn’t they know when and where to fly and not fly? shouldn’t THEY do their research? How can the everyday cacher know to tell them the weather and how to fly if the assumption is that the majority of caches hike or walk to the cache (and that was the intention). Was it a hang-glider specific cache or something they were after? Would like to know more of the story.

Isn’t that kind of like saying if you have to swim to the cache, the CO needs to post a link to a website that has water temps and also a link to local swim coaches in the area?